Our world is one of patterns

Patterns are how we understand the world: from picking a ripe fruit, to singing along, remembering the alphabet or the way home, following a story or an animal’s tracks, reading my partner’s mood or the meaning of these words.

A pattern world calls for a Pattern Mind: one that can read and participate in the stories that everything is telling.

Albert Einstein famously said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them.”These “significant problems,” whether ecological, economic, or social, are not solvable separately, because they do not exist in isolation. Like the diverse symptoms of a complex disease, they are eruptions of underlying systemic causes. It does no good to “rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.” Only through shifting the underlying patterns can we solve the underlying problems. To shift underlying patterns we first need to be able to see and understand them.

We need to shift thepatterns of our seeing, thinking, and working. We need a Pattern Mind.